May 22, 2016

"His eldest son, Donald Jr., sat with his wife at a nearby table, as did Trump’s grandchildren and his youngest son, 10-year-old Barron. Melania’s soft-spokenness and Lewandowski and Hicks’s deferentiality — both referred to Trump as 'sir' and 'Mr. Trump' — lent the whole tableau an Old World texture, like a Habsburg patriarch in repose. 'This is fun, right?' Trump exclaimed. 'Really! We’re having a good time!'"

I tried to find an image that would help us with that description "like a Habsburg patriarch in repose." Maybe:

On "Meet the Press," Chuck Todd said that the "Wild Ride" piece was "epic" and would "take days to finish reading," and Draper self-effacingly called his own piece "Unreadably long." Maybe the affectation of modesty works somehow as a criticism of Trump's braggadocio. And then poor meek Draper got scarcely any speaking time. And yet this enormous sentence did at one point emerge from his lips:

But I think instead what they'd like to do is imagine this sort of boastful CEO of a company that bears his own name becoming or assuming the moral mantle of responsibility of being a public servant, which obligates you to, among other things, learn about the world and learn about your own issues with more granularity than he has currently demonstrated.

By the way, the NYT readers are livid about Draper's piece, if I may judge from the comments. Highest-rated:

Note to NYT: Stop, stop STOP!! plastering the front page with three or four articles about Donald Trump every single day. The media made him, and that includes you. Write about his rivals, and the issues, not about yourselves (the media). This is shameful non-journalism. Your readers expect and deserve better.

Second-highest-rated:

It's increasingly disturbing to me that we can't even rely on the NYT to take a racist, sexist, ignorant bigot to task for his abhorrent views and statements. This piece glosses over it and continually normalizes and romanticizes him; a yuuge disservice to the American public.

I'm fascinated by the concept of "normal" in relation to Trump. Have you noticed how hard many people — including Hillary — are working to frame Trump as non-normal?

Ah, yes, here's Hillary on that same "Meet the Press" episode. She was asked whether she was going to accept the invitation to debate Bernie Sanders before the California primary. She answered — infuriatingly — "You know, I haven't thought about it." How is that possible? That's an unforced lie.

And then she immediately — figure out this train of thought — segued to "But I think what's important is we're not going to let-- at least, my campaign is not going to let Donald Trump try to normalize himself in this period."

Todd pushed her a bit — "So you think a competitive Democratic primary is doing nothing but helping Donald Trump right now?" — and she went into a tirade about staying "focused on Donald Trump" in which she repeated this Trump-must-not-be-seen-as-normal meme:

"I do not want Americans... to start to believe that this is a normal candidacy."

I feel like I can hear the behind-the-scenes brainstorming: Americas must not be allowed to begin to think that Trump is normal.

But how is that going to work? Is she not going to respond on the merits as he serves up various issues in a thoughtful-seeming way? If she treats the GOP candidate as if his various policy statements are beneath response, won't she seem abnormal? And isn't this sneering at him going to generate empathy for him? It does in me. If you treat someone like an outsider, it triggers my inclusiveness instinct.

I know a big old self-satisfied billionaire is hardly an outcast in need of love, but the whole business of loving and hating politicians is crazy and surreal, and psychically it is about love and hate.

88 comments:

Trump is normal. He's a "blue collar billionaire" according to his son. He eats Big Macs but prefers The Whopper. He gets Wrestlemania. He gets reality TV. Really, he's more normal than the majority of pundits who try to figure him out.

A billionaire with a "blue collar" orientation. It's no wonder that they can't understand him, them, us. The pundits need to consider why they cannot reconcile moral and natural imperatives. Perhaps then they will appreciate this apparent paradox.

The media made Trump?? If there has ever been a candidate whom the media have so mightily struggled to unmake, I haven't heard of him. (Perhaps Rhythm and Balls can enlighten me.)

Why is it that the Left always engages in myth-making, particularly when things don't fit The Narrative (i.e. every time, all of the time)? Is it because the entire intellectual edifice of socialism consists of magical thinking — that poverty can be banished by bleeding the rich, that crime can be banished by making everything lawful, that guns, jackboots, and prisons solve everything if wielded by the Good (i.e. themselves)?

But I think instead what they'd like to do is imagine this sort of boastful CEO of a company that bears his own name becoming or assuming the moral mantle of responsibility of being a public servant, which obligates you to, among other things, learn about the world and learn about your own issues with more granularity than he has currently demonstrated.

Are you freakin' kidding me? Does the author just not know anyone in the DC power elite? Public servant, my left nut! Will to Fuckin' Power is more like it!Every corporate head has to make more concessions & get his ego humbled on a weekly basis then does the even a lowly House member.

As for the unelected public servants in the federal government, they are for all intents & purposes un-fireable. They do whatever they please, which is, luckily for us all, as little as possible. No CEO of a publicly trading corporation (Trump Industries is privately held), even the owner's son, has such job protection.

An old BC cartoon: 1st frame: "If love is the opposite of hate, what comes in-between?" asks Peter to his companion while both are leaning against a rock contemplating the sunset. 2nd frame: Both are silent contemplating the question: 3rd frame: Comes the reply: "A sort of calculated insincerity." LOL!

Am I the only one who finds himself freakishly not normal? I don't aim for it, but my lack of connection with the majority of you all (maybe 100% of ya) is slightly disturbing, yet reassuring at the same time. Although I feel like it makes me a bit defective, I imagine it being the next big move on the Darwin trail, and confidence rises up in me like the buzz from a first drink, and I smile with a sense of mild relief.

The comparison to the Hapsburgs was a double-edged gratuitous insult (The Times is truly bankrupt, it it not?). Draper used the word patriarchy as a trigger to the feminist idiots (Granted most of them were male, but among the greatest monarchs of the House was a woman, Maria Theresa.) and the whole point of invoking the Hapsburgs was to remind his readers of a dynasty famous for incompetents and defectives (yet nevertheless ruled the first global empire in history and ruled over more Europeans than even the Caesars). What hypocrisy! The only dynast in this fight is named Clinton.

Do you know how the media made him? Because Trump talked to them. He talked to them all the time. Every time someone in the media asked him to come on & talk, he did. That was the secret to his success.

His rivals? Well, Bernie will do the talking, too, fer sure. But, Hillary? Hillary hasn't had off-the-cuff questions from her press corps since mid-December. Hillary's press appearances are scripted to the max, &, she doesn't like being pressed (e.g. her dismissive, sneering answer when Jorge Ramos of in-the-tank Univision asked about the e-mail server imbroglio). Trump gets air time because Trump is, to coin a phrase, "must-see TV". Watching Hillary is the TV equivalent of sex in a body condom.

Forty years in the Future all of the preceding internet will be on the head of a pin, and AI scanners will parse it all in minutes, then -- BEEP BBEP BEEP -- the Algorithms will identify my 5/22/16, 7:13 PM post as the only explanation to explain Hillary.

Defining someone you dislike as abnormal is called Bothering.I thought the Left was opposed to Othering!

Wait, hang on. Transexuality is supposed to be normal, right? Pointing out how rare and weird it is, even in a nonjudgmental way, is wrong because it is Othering. Right?Pointing out Obama's unusual upbringing was wrong (and racist) because it was Othering. But explicitly saying you are going to work to define your opponent as non-normal...is OK?

“I’m going to be better to women on women’s issues than Hillary Clinton and everybody else combined."

Now historically "women's issues" was always a code word for abortion. So we might see this as a dog whistle that he is not just pro-choice, but extremely pro-choice.

A good reporter would have asked that question.

But I don't think he's doing code words intentionally. I think he acts on instinct. He's bragging about how nice he is to women and how beautiful it's going to be for women. He's bragging about how big he is ("everybody else combined"). I think of all the abortion stances of his opponents, and I combine them, and I'm like, "So, abortion up until preschool?"

But if you asked him this question, if you challenged him on it, I think he would respond that he was not talking about abortion. And maybe he would say abortion is bad for women. Which it is, by the way. I think he's got an instinct about these things, and he's not going to announce how pro-choice he is, until after he has power. Or maybe he's sincere about his pro-life conversion.

His vice-president is going to be pro-life, of course. Almost all Republicans are pro-life.

The NYT reporter has no interest in finding out the truth. What the "fourth estate" wants to do is celebrate the powerful. Trust Trump! He's going to be better on women's issues than Hillary Clinton and everybody else combined!

Many Americans, of course, do not trust the government. And so the Fourth Estate's pro-government bias is showing very large cracks. And how arrogant do you have to be to call yourself "the fourth estate" anyway? You morons in the media, you millionaires on TV, do you not see how much we distrust you?

I certainly agree that the term 'public servant' when applied to elected officials is laughable. Trump will probably be the only true 'public servant' we've had in the oval office since Reagan, simply because he already has plenty of money, power and influence.

This isn't just about Trump. Bernie is the nearer threat. Hillary can't attack Bernie, it only makes people like him more and her less. They've been telling us Trump can't win. Now they need to change that narrative. People must be very afraid of the Trump monster, so afraid they abandon Bernie in fear of Trump.

...which obligates you to, among other things, learn about the world and learn about your own issues with more granularity than he has currently demonstrated.

Granularity is one of those technobabble words that people with spotty educations like to drop into their conversation intending to sound more analytic than can actually muster.

Other than some applications in chemistry, geology, and rarely in food science. Granularity is a term used in information science as a measure of imprecision — the fucking opposite of what the idiot Draper is trying to imply. Greater precision mean less granularity, not more. Granularity develops in data because computers must calculate with fixed exponential endpoints. For example if your PC has a 64-bit processor then the maximum single-precision exponent is 2^64 or the negative for values between 1 and 0. The mantissa has the same limit. A 64-bit mantissa raised to the power of a 64-bit exponent is a huge number, but the set of all numbers between 0 and (2^64)^(2^64) and the set of numbers actually representable are not the same. The first set is much bigger. The gaps which constitute the difference is called granularity.

In sharp contrast, Donnie has a lot of hostility and disrespect to The Washington Post. He did zero prep for his interview with them. He gave it no thought at all. This disrespect and disregard led to a public relations disaster. He let down his guard, and what did we see? Crazy shit!

The The New York Times is famous for missing the Watergate story. Missed it! Missed it completely! This is the same newspaper that reported what a great guy Stalin was. And forgot to report about all the Ukrainians who were murdered by his regime.

I'm fascinated by the concept of "normal" in relation to Trump. Have you noticed how hard many people — including Hillary — are working to frame Trump as non-normal?

Of course! That is because he is not normal. This self-loving solipsistic excuse for a human being has never lived normally. What normal 70 year old senior that you happen to know spends all night sending caustic tweets worded at a six-year-old level about his competitors? Now I will admit that seniors with some form of dementia are often cited as "not in a right mind" so perhaps we have Crooked Hillary, Crazy Bernie and Deranged Donald.

@Quaestor You might want to review IEEE floating point formats. Note that double precision is standard on both 32 and 64 bit architectures, it is a function of the FPU, not the number of memory address bits.

So Hillary wants us to "normalize" on somebody that hasn't driven in 25 years, doesn't know how to order at Chipotle, travels in a bubble where the people she interacts with in are usually loyalists who are pre-chosen as actors in a choreographed event? Someone who is carefully shielded from all media questions...

A person who has sold influence on a breathtaking scale never before seen? A person who setup a private email server specifically and knowingly to evade public transparency and accountability is now to be considered "normal"?

A person with a dubious past where people get fired and files go missing? A person who repossessed real estate from borrowers and defended sexual assaulters with a laugh? An enabler and enforcer of her husband's behaviors in ways that is far from most Americans' sense of normal?

Good luck with that Hillary!! Maybe when you are not dodging sniper fire you can get back in touch with real life!

That story was too boring to read because it added absolutely nothing to my picture of Trump so far as I read it. The details were not going to mass up into an interesting picture because for readers now the mainstream media are in any picture the mainstream composes. "Naturally I hate Trump and am looking to derail him and screw his racist idiot voters" is what they are saying and it is all they are saying. The camera has reversed and is shooting the person taking the picture.

Hillary explains that she is going to try to de-humanize Trump. Well, that's Hillary for you. It isn't a picture of Trump. And frankly I don't think Hillary is going to be a master of Photoshop and foist a clever pictorial lie on us. It's my understanding that she exposed all our national policy secrets because she couldn't learn how to use digital equipment. She may not know that there are media beyond print and TV.

@Questor - your point is valid, but your example is not, because fliating point numbers are not typically evenly divided between mantissa and exponent. Usually, the mantissa is much longer. Sometimes you have two sign bits, sometimes one, and even sometimes zero. I got into this a decade and a half ago when I was writing patents on improved methods of calculating common functions. The improvements were in reducing the cumulative rounding error resulting from a series of floating point calculations. For one thing, you want to structure calculations so that you add and subtract numbers with similar exponents first.

we don't need Democrats and their mouthpieces in the media to tell us Trump isn't a normal candidate. That's why he has gotten so much traction. The normal candidates like Hillary have fucked up this country beyond recovery.

I tried to find an image that would help us with that description "like a Habsburg patriarch in repose.

And the best you could find was Carlos el Hechizado, a.k.a. Charles the Bewitched, who is probably the poster child for the bad effects of inbreeding.Bit of unstated bias there, Ann. Try Google Images: Hapsburg Monarch.

When did "normal" become a good quality for the most exceptional and powerful job in human history anyway? Nobody wants to see Dave from down at the 7/11 wrestle Roman Reigns for the WWE belt, do they?

Charles II (Carlos el Hechizado) was a tragedy. The Miranda portait Althouse hot linked to is generous to say the least. Charles was physically disgusting in so many ways it's sickening to read some of the contemporary witnesses from his court.

Decorating the White House has been traditionally the First Lady's prerogative. Seeing as how we haven't had a lady in the White House for some years now the task was probably delegated to unpaid staff intern, and looks it.

Blogger Quaestor said... Granularity is one of those technobabble words that people with spotty educations like to drop into their conversation intending to sound more analytic than can actually muster. Other than some applications in chemistry, geology, and rarely in food science. Granularity is a term used in information science as a measure of imprecision — the fucking opposite of what the idiot Draper is trying to imply. Greater precision mean less granularity, not more. No. Granularity is an overused buzz word deployed by over educated inexperienced consultants and/or project managers in meetings and presentations. It's used as an adjunct to "in the weeds" and the "30,000-foot view". Most of these folks want to avoid the weekd and granularity to stay focused on the 30,000-foot view. Increasing granularity means looking at problems at smaller and smaller scales. Grains are small so increased granularity means increasing smallness. In geology, something that is granular is derived from a larger solid that has been ground up into smaller bits.

It doesn't surprise me that computer programmers use the reciprocal of the common meaning. You point your finger at the "other", but it ends up pointing at yourself.

"It's increasingly disturbing to me that we can't even rely on the NYT to take a racist, sexist, ignorant bigot to task for his abhorrent views and statements." Yeah, that's the NYT problem -- not Prog enough.

"Deferentiality"? Doesn't the NYT employ editors? "Deference" is the actual word, and sounds and looks better. "Deferentiality" is a work only a third-rate writer trying to impress us with his vocabulary would ever use. And why didn't the editor fix it? Are halfway competent editors to expensive for the NYT anymore?

Why should I care what this old baggage (in the 19th century English use of the word) ways or believes. Sexist racist, bigoted, not normal is all neener neener playground stuff. Grow up and get a rhetorical pair.

Why should I care what this old baggage (in the 19th century English use of the word) says or believes. Sexist racist, bigoted, not normal is all neener neener playground stuff. Grow up and get a rhetorical pair.

I'm starting to wonder if Hillary is trying to throw this race, as if she owes money to bookies or something, but then I remember her level of incompetence is really staggering. Pointing out that Trump is not a "normal" candidate is practically right out of his press releases. Who on earth would think that's a negative for him? Just come out and say "he's a bad boy who plays by his own rules" or "the problem with Trump is he shakes things up too much!"

I sort of expected this year would be a mudfight but now I'm wondering if Hillary is just going to flop around like this for the next few months.

Yep let's "normalize" on a worldview where the IRS is used against political enemies. Where citizens are asked about the content of their prayers and are audited to intimidate them from raising questions. They want is to "normalize" on a world where failures of policy are blamed on internet videos and lies are thrown so brazenly it becomes a hash that confuses the public.

Hillary wants us to "normalize" where scandals are spun in "echo chambers" and lies are planted with compliant reporters who will regurgitate the party line. Hillary had some reporters who would tweet exactly what they requested! And where some reporters like Cand Crowley, who are supposed to be playing referee, intervene in a Presidential debate to call a ball a strike in front of millions (then apologize for their "error" later in front of dozens.)

Let's reward our campaign contributors with loan guarantees like Solyndra and throw out a hundred years of Law in cases like the GM bankruptcy. No wonder Obama can't get business owners to commit capital when he keeps business wrong-footed..

Do we want to "normalize" on a candidate who has been part of an administration that has treated the Constitution like toilet paper? That has turned the government into a weapon against us?

Cooperation and bipartisan approaches are all well and good, but why would anyone think Hillary will be able to make this happen. She listed Republicans as the enemies she is most proud to have, why exactly would any Republican trust her? This lays on top of the myriad reasons for nobody to trust her.

Ah, yes, here's Hillary on that same "Meet the Press" episode. She was asked whether she was going to accept the invitation to debate Bernie Sanders before the California primary. She answered — infuriatingly — "You know, I haven't thought about it." ... That's an unforced lie.

No, that's a forced lie. (if you're Hillary Clinton)

What else is she going to say: I have thought about it, and I don't want to debate Bernie Sanders? Or give some kind of implausible excuse?

Or say that the race is over, so there's no point in debating? That would anger voters.

This is Hillary's way of avoiding answering a question.

By the way, anytime Hillary says "You know" it means she is about to tell a lie. It means. it is avery questionable statement.

If the NY Times thinks of Donald Trump as Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows ("Wild Ride" can be associated with no other historical or fictional character in this context), to be consistent they should refer to Hillary Clinton as Chief Weasel.